All atwitter

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Growing up in post-USSR Moldova and frequently visiting my grandparents in the Odessa region of Ukraine, I heard many times a joke exploiting a particular feature of the first line of the Ukrainian national anthem. "Ukraine isn't dead yet, and nor its glory, its will", it goes, but simply by changing the intonation of the first part as you can do in Ukrainian or Russian, you get a meaning of "So, isn't Ukraine dead yet?". True, times were tough, and, I remember, at one time there was an ad running on a TV channel called 1+1 saying "There are 52 millions of us!". That was true from around 1991 to 1994, but today the figure is down to 46 million, due to migration and a demographic crisis with the fourth greatest population decrease rate in the world.

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to write about: just recently, in my ignorance, I have learnt that Ukrainian national anthem isn't unique in eagerly lending itself to mockery. Polish national anthem starts with the words, "Poland has not perished yet / So long as we live". In fact, Polish and Ukrainian anthems are remarkably similar in meaning, which isn't surprising, given the long and tumultuous history of both nations' struggle for independence and unification:

Ukraine has not perished, neither her glory, nor freedom,Upon us, fellow--Ukrainians, fate shall smile once more.Our enemies will vanish, like dew in the morning sun,And we too shall rule, brothers, in a free land of our own.

We'll lay down our souls and bodies to attain our freedom,And we'll show that we, brothers, are of the Cossack nation.

We'll stand together for freedom, from the Syan to the Don,We will not allow others to rule in our motherland.The Black Sea will smile and grandfather Dnipro will rejoice,For in our own Ukraine fortune shall flourish again.

Our persistence and our sincere toils will be rewarded,And freedom's song will resound throughout all of Ukraine.Echoing off the Carpathians, and rumbling across the steppes,Ukraine's fame and glory will be known among all nations.

Poland has not perished yetSo long as we still liveThat which alien force has seizedWe at sabrepoint shall retrieve

March, march, DąbrowskiFrom Italy to PolandLet us now rejoin the nationUnder thy command

Cross the Vistula and WartaAnd Poles we shall beWe've been shown by BonaparteWays to victory

Like Czarniecki Poznań regainsFighting with the Swede,To free our fatherland from chainsWe shall return by sea

Father, in tearsSays to his BasiaJust listen, it seems that our peopleAre beating the drums

Isn't it remarkable how semantically similar these two anthems are?

Just recently, in 2003, Ukraine has made a neat change to their anthem, making it shorter, changing the first line to say "Neither Ukraine's glory nor its will is dead yet (Ще не вмерла України і слава, і воля)", and taking out all of the text saying how, supposedly, in the future, all of the land "from Syan to Don" will be United Ukraine because, of course, now all of that land is in independent Ukraine. The new anthem, in my opinion, is much stronger.

Polish anthem, in comparison, contains names and details that are no longer relevant for a modern Pole -- and the mention of Bonaparte is a dead giveaway of its origins as a military song written in 1797, the high point of the Napoleonic era. And that's even after (rather diplomatic) omission of two more verses mentioning Germans and Muscovites.

That, however is nothing out of ordinary in the anthem tradition around the world: I always get a kick out of thinking about how French primary schoolchildren get to sing about how "the tainted blood / will drench our furrows" and how "against us / the tyranny's bloody banner is raised". If they went on to sing all of La Marseillaise, of course, there are lots of little gems there that I dare say wouldn't be rated PG-13. Here's a part that says that Frenchmen are magnanimous warriors and spare their enemy's life, except for...

And so on. So I guess we can forgive the Poles a little nostalgic reference to Swedes, Italy and Czarniecki here and there. And if you don't like the lyrics, you can just conveniently sing the pan-slavic anthem "Hey, Slavs" to the same music. Groovy!

For more information, Wikipedia has a lot of material on Polish and Ukrainian anthems.

Friends

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" — was that it? — "I prefer men to cauliflowers" — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.